8. Gwangju Biennale, 2010

10,000 LIVES

Titled "10,000 Lives", the 8th Gwangju Biennale in 2010 developed as a sprawling investigation of the relationships that bind people to images and images to people. With works by more than 100 artists, realized between 1901 and 2010, as well as several new commissions, the exhibition was configured as a temporary museum in which both artworks and cultural artifacts are brought together to compose an idiosyncratic catalogue of figures and icons, faces and masks, idols and dolls.

Encompassing a diverse range of media, with a particular emphasis on portraiture, the exhibition engaged our obsession with images, and our need to create substitutes, effigies, avatars and stands-in for ourselves and our loved ones. The exhibition title was drawn from Maninbo (10,000 Lives), a thirty-volume epic poem conceived by Korean author Ko Un while imprisoned in 1980 for his participation in the South Korean democratic movement. Held in solitary confinement, as a means to preserve his sanity, Ko envisioned a poem which described every single person he had met throughout his life, including historical figures and fictional characters encountered in literature. Upon his release he began writing the 3,800 poems that compose Maninbo (10,000 Lives), a magnum opus that reads as a personal encyclopedia of humanity.

Unfolding as a family album, the 8th Gwangju Biennale looked at images as sites of affection and means of survival. The exhibition also examined how images are fabricated, circulated, stolen and exchanged, interrogating their power, while trying to capture their many lives.